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MoviTrack: Intimidating to Dogs
The behemoth MoviTrack, roughly the size of your house, but with no place for stray dogs. I've managed to reduce the time it takes me to put in my contact lenses to about 87 minutes. The secret, for all of you contact lens-wearers reading this right now, is practice, practice, practice. You will never become as fast as me without putting them in it at least once every two weeks.
Unfortunately, we didn't have 87 minutes as we had to be at
MoviTrack HQ in Salta at balls o'clock in the morning, so it was Glasses McGee for me today.
(Incidentally, "Balls O'Clock in the Morning" is not just what I call the excellent berries-n-peanut-butter breakfast drink Eden invented years ago. It also happens to be a cool band name, should any band ever be wise enough to use it.)
MoviTrack is a safari company started by a couple of Germans who fell in love with Northern Argentina. They offer a number of safari packages at incredibly expensive prices, by Argentine standards. Argentines love to travel in their own country - and why not, there's plenty to see here - but they'd rarely be able to afford something like this. Hell,
we can barely afford something like this, but after five days of fevers
Ancient Indian Burial Ground
This is the sort of thing I was warned about in zombie movies, so I kept my distance. and kidney infections, we had some catching up to do. To my surprise, a couple of Argentines turned up in our safari group. It figures, they live in California.
The safari we opted for,
Safari a las Nubes®, utilized the awesome mass and power of MoviTrack's largest and most intimidating vehicle, the MoviTrack. (Clever name, but not as clever as Balls O'Clock in the Morning. Speaking of which...)
It was still dark when we reached our first stop,
La Polvorilla, at about 7am. La Polvorilla is a giant bridge/viaduct, 224 meters long and 70 meters high, that is part of an impressive stretch of railroads known as
Tren a Las Nubes, or "Train to the Clouds." These tracks are some of the highest in the world, and the train travels along 29 bridges, 21 tunnels, 13 viaducts, two "curls" and two "zigzags" (whereby the train has to go forward and backward to ascend). Unfortunately, there wasn't enough light for a photo of the bridge and the train's been out of service for months, so you're just going to have to take their word for it as I did. Sucka!
By the time it started to get light
Whack-A-Cack
Visions of cacti such as this one gave me some pretty good ideas for a new game at Chuck E. Cheese's. out, maybe 8am, our MoviTrack safari guide evicted all 12 of us passengers, forcing us into a small train station in a town that allegedly used to exist called Chorrillos. Once everyone on the tour had established there was nothing to see here, we were let back onto the truck where, both like and unlike a Go-Bot, the interior had been transformed by our guide into a breakfast nook. We sat at makeshift tables and ate
medialunas, which is the silly Spanish word for the silly French word
croissant. Before long, and after being booted out of the vehicle one more time, the tables were gone and the roof came off and we were cruisin' through the mountains in a convertable. A cumbersome, gas-guzzling, probably missile-proof convertable.
I wouldn't say that the following eight to ten hours were boring. Most of them, in fact, were breathtaking. Grasping onto the top of the MoviTrack subjected one to tremendous winds but more importantly a panoramic view of things so unreal it often times felt like a 360-degree rear projection, an interactive ride at DisneyWorld, a high-definition television or something more explicable than the actual unbelievable landscape. But I can't really offer
much more description beyond that: Mountainy mountains. Cactusy cacti. Llamas (indigenous). Donkeys (not indigenous). Ancient Indian burial grounds. Entire towns the size of my last studio apartment. We saw plenty of things today worth seeing; converting these visions into words simply seems like a waste of time. Not unlike the beaches on Ilha Grande (see
So two Americans and an Israeli are on an island...), it's easier to just tell you to go there.
Yeah, yeah. You probably don't have the time or money for that. And if you do, you're wasting both on high-speed internet. Since I'm such a nice guy, and so you don't need to leave your chair, I give you:
Salinas Grandes. 8,290 square kilometers (3,200 square miles) of salt flats in the middle of nowhere, Argentina. What sounds considerably less exciting and harder to describe than mountainy mountains is a vast sodium and potassium mine, where I'm sure a lot of busty women would have engaged in copious drag racing in the 60's had they not been doing it in
Russ Meyer movies instead. Perhaps an atom bomb was tested here.
There is also an absurd amount of salt on the ground.
Salt, and small rectangular pools carved into the ground by
Salty in Salta
Who are you tryin' to get crazy with, ese? Don't you know I'm loco? the miners. I don't know how they make them so symmetrical or why, but once the pools fill with rain water there is a process that occurs of which I am completely ignorant and this creates mineable salt. Then men in waders and ski masks hop in and pick at the salt with an axe, another process relatively impossible to figure out just by watching. At some point, they produce big piles of salt, and from what I can tell, those piles of salt are deposited into the burger I ordered in Puerto Iguazu. For picking at salt all day in the hot sun, high winds, waders and a ski mask, these miners earn 15 pesos for every 1000 kilos of salt. That comes out to about 300 pesos a month, roughly the price we paid for the safari.
Not to worry, though -- they sell art! I dismissed the notion that the "300 pesos a month" spiel was no more than a sales pitch and shelled out some cash, slightly more than they were asking for, for a hand-chiseled piece of slate featuring etchings of llamas and cacti. As if I hadn't seen enough of THAT crap all
Miney in Salty
Mine mine mine! day.
Eventually it was time to leave the salt flats. I would have loved to stay, perhaps to look around at nothing some more or go about licking each individual square kilometer, but MoviTrack was waiting. And believe me, when MoviTrack says we go, we don't argue with MoviTrack. We go.
Go, incidentally, to
Cerro de los Siete Colores. Aside from being mountainy, Seven-Colors Mountain is also colorful. It's so colorful, the inhabitants of the small village of Purmamarca decided to build their small village of Purmamarca there. It's so colorful, many tourists visit the small village of Purmamarca. So colorful, the small village of Purmamarca decided to overprice AA batteries for my camera. Ah well. It's close enough to the salt mines for me not to care.
And finally, after a two-and-a-half-hour drive back over a 4,000-meter-high (13,000 feet) mountain and a dark, foggy (oh, hell, I'll even call it "mysterious") valley, we made our triumphant return to MoviTrack HQ in Salta proper at 9:30pm -- precisely fifteen-and-a-half hours after we left. We only considered going out dancing for a few seconds before settling on going to freakin' bed.
And that, my friends, is the
Brokeback Salt Flats
Eden should be smoking Marlboros with that hat on. Then she could say, "I wish I could quit you!" story of how I tried to put my contacts in one morning and then failed.
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drae j namaste-rose
non-member comment
sometimes fate plays a hand..
it might've been a good thing you couldn't get your contact lenses in.. you don't want to get salt in your eyes... sometimes it's better to have protective glasses. why do they cut those rectangles so perfectly? and in a straight line like that?